Tuesday, January 15, 2013

FIDDLY THINGS BOX

Another piece from my soon-to-be-published book

RAINY-DAY-OR-NOT-FEELING-WELL-FIDDLY-THINGS
BOX

I’m using a medium-sized camphor box (like a
miniature camphor chest) for our rainy-day-or-not-feeling-well-fiddly-things
box.I think it’s important that the box
that contains the fiddly things is special and nice – it adds to the care the children
take of the items inside.

Some children are extremely tactile and love to hold
and feel things.Other children are very
orderly and like to sort and order everything they come across – both these
types of children will love this idea.

In the bottom of our box I have cut a piece of purple
fur fabric to fit so that everything sits safely in the box without sliding
around.If you have room in the box include a nice
piece of black felt or velvet rolled up for your child to set the items out on.

These are some of the items you might like to include
in your box:

-smooth glass shapes like marbles or glass sea-shells

-acorns

-chestnuts

-bits of chain – various thicknesses

-smooth or bumpy shells

-wooden rings

-bells

-acrylic, enameled or wooden rings or bangles

-deep sea shells

-polished rocks

-“sea” glass (bits of broken glass smoothed by the waves)

-Beautiful old brooches (take pin out of back if children
young)

-Various old bits of beautiful costume jewelry (not junky!)

-large beads of various shapes made from various things:

oceramic

oacrylic

oglass

owood

oenameled

Another idea along this line is a button tin or
button box.It can take several years to
collect items of interest to put in this tin, but it’s a lot of fun for a child
to sort through the button tin, and it can calm a restless child as they look
for all the dark blue buttons with the triangle shape on, or all the red car
ones etc.